Reading Poetry

As a Christian I acknowledge the importance of words. At
God’s word life began (Genesis 1). Jesus is the Word made flesh; who came to
dwell among us (John 1). And it is by words and the Word that God has chosen to
reveal himself to us (Hebrews 1). Given the significance of words, I need to be
considered in how I read. In last week’s blog I looked at the ethics of reading
and pondered how reading poetry may help us to read. In this post I want to
further that discussion.

How do you approach reading a poem? If, for example, I were
to ask you to read Anne Bradstreet’s ‘To My Dear and Loving Husband’,

How did you go? What were the first things you noticed about
it? When you read it, what did you do? Did you skim through it quickly, in
order to get back to the prose? Did you read it slowly in your head? Did you
read it aloud? How many times did you read it?

There is so much that could be written about the reading of poetry
that this blog could veer towards the epic! So, I’m going to focus on the two aspects
which together make poetry distinct (at least in my mind) from prose, and
consider how thinking about reading in terms of these things will shape how we
approach reading poetry.

First, as best you can read poetry aloud. As indicated in the
previous blog there is something about poetry’s visual and aural character that
makes it distinct, that makes it poetry. Even better than reading poetry aloud yourself
is to listen to poets read their own (or others’) poetry, either online or at a
poetry reading. I still get a shiver down my spine thinking about hearing David
Malouf read his poetry only metres from where I sat in a courtyard café on a
humid November evening, or W B Yeats’ voice come crackling out of the past as I
listened to a recording on YouTube of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Yeats, who
notoriously declared: “It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse
the poems I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they
were prose.”,[2] is
not wrong in wishing his verse being read as that: verse!

Aside from YouTube there are many sites on the internet
which allow you to listen (for free) to writers reading their own or others’
work. A great one is The Poetry Archive. [3]

Secondly, part of poetry’s appeal is that it is both aural
and visual. We see the patterns on
the page made by the line breaks, and often this plays a role in our
understanding of the poem. Indeed it is the visual that helps indicate how we
are to read the poem (the aural aspect). An example of this is the work of William
Carlos Williams, who explored the way line breaks can impact the syntax and
therefore the meaning of the poem. We can see this in one of his most famous
imagist poems, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’.[4]

However, the visual can be more than just a way of
indicating rhythm and exploring syntax. I have been exploring ‘The Song of the
Sea’ in Exodus 15 in preparation to lead a Bible Study. As it is written in the
Torah scroll it has a visual pattern that is said to represent the two walls of
the Red Sea, as parted by God, and the Israelites walking safely down the
middle.[5] Unfortunately
for us this is lost in translation. Despite this the poem is still rendered as
poetry in our different versions, given line breaks (although they are of
varying length), which indicates to us that it is different to the rest of the
Exodus narrative. This difference is first seen and then heard as we read. The
significance, for the Israelites and for us, of God’s mighty hand rescuing them
from out of the deluge is still heard, even if we don’t have the same visual
cue as if we were reading it in the Hebrew.

There are many other features that I could discuss at length
in terms of how to read poetry. (And I do hope you will forgive me if the ones
I have chosen seem obvious- they are, but I’ve seen postgraduate students of
English Literature get these wrong!) However, I think these are the two which,
when dealt with, can bring about the greatest change in terms of our
understanding and enjoyment of poetry.

I know I hinted that I would provide you with an answer to
what to read in the previous blog. However, there are just too many great poets
out there to explore that I couldn’t be so prescriptive. So far I have indicated
at least four poets from three different countries and spanning almost five
centuries in this blog post- so, there’s a beginning for you.

A final word on how we read poetry. One of the ways that I
have personally found helpful in approaching reading poetry has been to
consider how poets see their own writing. Ars
poetica (Latin, “the art of poetry”) is a common theme in poetry, and it is
interesting to trace through the different ideas about poetry that different
poets have made over time (the term goes all the way back to Horace). In
reading through these poems you can look for clues in what the poet says about
their own craft as an indication of how to read their poetry. Here are some selected verses
from two Ars Poetica written in the
last century that will hopefully whet your appetite for reading poetry: